Interruption is the 30th edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. This installation considers the evolutionary graphic field of contemporary times. Printerly processes touch many types of present-day art. Select, traditional media have evolved and adapted to maintain their relevance, while digital processes, after a long fermentation, have finally taken legitimate hold as artistic tools in their own right. Interruption surveys the extension of traditional as well as new approaches to printmaking in response to our 21st-century communications.
The works included in the Biennial echo and comment on the conditions of the world in which we live: how we receive our information, how we interact – or attempt to – with each other, how we (mis)perceive our world. Clamouring, unfiltered data bombards us. Masquerading commercial and political agendas vie for our attention alongside personal thoughts and images that are more than we can ever possibly absorb. The hyperactivity of text and image begs for our attention. While some artists respond by returning to basic, even primal, forms of image reproduction (fire, shadows, tattoos, gunshots), others embrace the randomness of social media picture boards, the ghostliness of heat-sensitive live-feed video, endless streams of leaked governmental documents, or the brief haikus of the Twittersphere.
Interruption considers both the fresh application of traditional means by leading-edge artists and the innovative incorporation of new printerly technologies in fine-art investigations. Both approaches contemplate our contemporary transmissions as the basis of their works. Interruption explores the graphic as both form and content, in an invigorated polygraphic terrain that links the work of diverse contemporary artists from around the world.Curated by Deborah Cullen, PhD.Participating artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Burak Arıkan, Dennis Ashbaugh & William Ford Gibson, Tammam Azzam, Xu Bing, Luis Camnitzer, caraballo-farman, Alex Cerveny, Mario Čaušić, Vuk Ćosić, Milos Djordjevic, Tomás Espina, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze & Gianluigi Scarpa, Mihael Giba, Ana Golici, María Elena González, Meta Grgurevič and Urša Vidic, Dragan IIic, Sanela Jahić, Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Thomas Kilpper, André Komatsu, Gorazd Krnc, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Nicola López, Ivan Marušić Klif, Yucef Merhi, Ottjörg A.C., Renata Papišta, Adam Pendleton, Agnieszka Polska, Zoran Poposki, Marjetica Potrč, Gerhard Richter, Venelin Shurelov, Dario Šolman, Nika Špan, Teo Spiller, Waltraut Tänzler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Vargas-Suarez Universal, Tomas Vu-Daniel

Deborah Cullen, PhD is Director & Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in the City of New York. She served as Chief Curator for El Panal/The Hive: 3ra Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe, Puerto Rico (2012). Previously, she was Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, New York, where she was an editor for the 500-page anthology, Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (El Museo del Barrio and Yale University Press, 2012). Other exhibitions include Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (2009) and the internationally traveling project, Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 (2008-2011) for which she received an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. She curated Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010), and authored the monograph Rafael Ferrer (UCLA, 2012). Cullen wrote her dissertation on the Jamaican-American master printer Robert Blackburn, who founded The Printmaking Workshop in New York in 1948. She was curator of the Printmaking Workshop Print Collection from 1993-1996, and arranged the acquisition of 2500 works from these holdings by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Venues: International Centre of Graphic Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Jakopič Promenade